He coos and his hands reach for me. I slap them away, stepping to another boulder, stumbling over a crevasse. He takes a step forward, covering all the ground with one stride, and the hands come again, aiming for my face, the cooing getting louder, and I grab one of them, bending back the fingers. They pop, and two of them come loose from their joints.
The giant frowns and sticks out his chin shiny with drool. He forms his good hand into a fist and hits me in the ear.
The world explodes, then recedes with a keening whine, bound up with the buzzing. I grab the side of my face and red washes over my vision. I am furious. A furious one, in the flesh, and I rush at him, arms swinging wildly. My blows have no effect on the huge body, just like they don’t in so many of my dreams where I have no strength, raining down punches soft as feathers on one dangerous figure after another.
He shoves me and I fall. On the ground, I kick out at his legs, and catch him on the side of the knee. The giant falls, as well, and I’m on top of him. My fists do nothing but bounce off his skin, so I claw, I bite, as we roll back and forth. When he’s on top, I can’t breathe, and feel the darkness closing in to take me. I scream with whatever air I have left in my lungs into his face, which gets very close to mine, his hot breath suffocating me, his teeth bared like animal. Like a dog. A giant dog perched on my chest.
A stray mortar shell whistles fast and hits nearby, and he is blown to the side, releasing me from his weight. He rolls twice and hits his head on a rock, dazing himself. I kick him in the face, breaking his nose, and he slumps onto his back. I jump on his chest and straddle his huge shape, my legs spread wide. Making a sound I never knew I had in me, and have never uttered before, I tear into his face with my fingers, digging with my nails, mashing at his damaged nose with my palm, poking out an eye with a thumb, catching the inside of his lip with three fingers and pulling with all my strength. The skin gives and rips open, a feeling that horrifies me, fuels me. His arms lift me from his chest but I redouble my efforts, grasping for his slimy tongue, reaching down into this throat, grabbing what I can of anything inside of him.
My nails push through his mouth under his tongue and I grab hold of a hard, thick bone. My other fingers join the first, and I get a firm, five-finger grip. I extend my legs and find purchase with my feet, then heave toward the sky, my hand locked inside his mouth. With a rip and then a pop, the bone comes loose, and I am flung backward with the release.
I fall on my ass, bounce, and end up on my side. The giant gets to his feet, his back to me, then slowly turns. His face is a seeping nightmare. Slime oozes from a hollow eye socket, his good eye wide, the iris black. His nose is gone, and his lips are torn back, revealing his top teeth. Below that, there is nothing but a lolling tongue, writhing like a leech through a torrent of blood, searching for something to catch it. A gurgling roar rises from his wrecked throat.
I scramble to my feet. In my hand, I hold the man’s—the boy’s—jawbone, teeth white through the blood, meat and connective tissue still attached.
The giant reaches out his hands, one broken, the other whole, and comes for me. I take the jawbone into my fist and meet him halfway, slashing for anything soft.
38. South of Heaven
I look at the orange in my hand. I poke it with my thumb, but only make a dent in the skin. It doesn’t tear. Chapel watches me.
“I told the people who found me, in the jungle, after, that I peeled his face like an orange.”
Chapel remains silent, still processing what I just told him.
“I killed that boy, and I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He was just…curious, and I killed him for it.”
“We’ve all killed for lesser reasons.”
“Yeah,” I say, this stupid word not even coming close to expressing it all.
Chapel waits for me to continue.
“I killed that boy.” Tears stream down my cheek as I press my thumbnail lightly into the orange, opening the skin. “I killed my brother, I think. Long time ago. I killed him, I think.”
I’ve never told another human being not related by blood about this. Only my family knew, and that was narrowed to a select few. My daddy knew, which is why he left. Never laid a hand on me for it. He never had to, because the removal of his eyes from me that day forward hurt more than any hands he could have put on me. After my daddy left, my momma left, too, in a different way. Just faded and faded until she wasn’t there anymore. Then it was just me and my grandmother, but she didn’t know. Or if she did, she never told me, or acted like it, all the way until she was taken from me, too, tongue sticking out like a strangled bird.
“I killed my brother, I think. Long time ago. Then I killed that boy on the rocks. Stuffed his body into a hole and left him there, and then I ran until everything went black.”
The tears stream hot, expelling years of guilt and shame and rage. They burn my cheeks.
“Those eyes found me when I woke up. At the edge of the jungle, way back in the fog. Yellow. Looking at me. Knowing me, what I’d done. So I ran again.”
The jawbone is now in my other hand. Chapel looks at it, then back at me. “I’ve been carrying this around for five years,” I say. “This and all of it. And I ain’t had a good day or night’s rest ever since that time on the rocks.”
“I’m sorry,” Chapel says. “About all of it.”
“Fuck you.”
That’s fair,” he says. “You’re angry.”“
“Angry? Nah, I’m fucking furious.” The gun itches in my waistband. I’ve never wanted to kill a man more in my life.
“I suppose you are.”
“Why did you lead us out there? There were hundreds of them. Thousands. We were sitting ducks. Everyone died. Medrano, Render, McNulty, Darby…”
“Not everyone.”
“Everyone,” I insist. “Except maybe you.”
He looks away, brows furrowed, holding something inside his eyes.
“What happened?” I say, almost pleading.
“Tactical error.”
“How did you think that would ever work?”
“I believed in a belief,” Chapel says, turning back to me, more sure with his words now that he’s back on message. That old bullshit message. “I had faith in faith.”
He’s trying to be clever, and I almost gag. “Faith dies when it meets a bullet,” I say. “Lead and iron cure faith real fucking fast.”
“No they don’t. Lead and iron make it stronger.”
“It didn’t out there, on that night.”
“Something went wrong…” he says, a twitch shooting up the side of his face. He rubs it.
“You went wrong, and we all paid for it.”
“You don’t think I’ve paid?” he says, rising to his feet, his voice elevating with him. “You don’t think I’ve suffered each and every second of my life since then? The dead have it easy. They just disappear into nothing. It’s the living that go on suffering.”
“They don’t disappear,” I say, thinking back to the French house, to every waking moment since I came to after they found me in wandering, half mad, in a Thai jungle. “Not all of them.” I slump back, dropping the orange. It rolls on the clay floor and disappears into the shadows of a corner.
Chapel begins pacing, his words taking on a rehearsed speed, called forward from many years ago. He’s not listening to me, lost in his old playbook. “We’d used it before, Operation Wandering Soul, and it’d worked in limited applications. We’d play on the Vietnamese belief of the Wandering Soul, where if a soldier was killed far from his homeland, and his remains weren’t returned and buried on his family’s land, his soul, his ghost, would wander forever.”